Oracle has emerged as a major competitor in the enterprise Linux market after a major Linux migration effort in 2004. Offering support contracts for certain Linux distributions in the past year and putting the finishing touches on their own Linux distribution, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle has demonstrated that it is serious about Linux and would like to muscle in on RHEL's market share.

By submitting your personal information, you agree to receive emails regarding relevant products and special offers from TechTarget and its partners. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

Red Hat is clearly the leader in today's enterprise Linux market and Oracle is clearly the leader in the database market. Put them both together, and you have two very powerful systems that work well together. This article shows how to install and configure Oracle10 in a RHEL5 environment.

This command prints the hardware platform and machine name. It also validates that we need to download the 64 bit x86 version, which we can get directly from Oracle. After unzipping it to the box and imploding it with cpio, follow the instructions which are listed in the download section. When the directories are finished imploding, we are ready to move on.

Let's make sure SELinux is disabled:

[oracle@172_29_140_62 database]$ cat /etc/selinux/config | grep SELINUX # SELINUX= can take one of these three values: SELINUX=disabled

Now we are ready for the installation. If you are not going to do the install from a GUI console, you will need to have X installed on your PC. I've found that one of the better open source (and free) X servers is Cygwin/X. If you choose to install X, you can start it up this way: Start > freeXer> XWin Xserver. You also need to enable X11 forwarding from your SSH client. I used PuTTY (another free download) for this exercise. To use PuTTY, go to: SSH > Tunnels, then highlight the box that says enable X11 forwarding. If your display is not set properly, you will never be able to install Oracle, as the character based option disappeared about a decade ago.

At the first screen, you have the option of creating a database or performing an advanced installation. We will chose the default and let Oracle create a database for us. Enter a password (remember it, we'll need it later) and then keep going.

As we move forward with the install, we will need to specify an inventory director and the credentials. Doing this automatically sets up subdirectories for each product, which contains inventory information.

When this is completed, the installer will verify that the kernel parameters are configured appropriately. In our case, there are several parameters which have not yet been changed, and we are warned of them. Here are the parameters that you need to change:

Unfortunately, I did not have any more space in which to add swap. My rule of thumb is to give swap ½ the amount of RAM, that is if you have it to give. I ignored the this warning and moved forward. After your system is running and being utilized, I would monitor the system to determine if you really do need additional swap. This part of the install can take awhile, but the progress tracker is very helpful.

After this complete, the install wants you to run several scripts.

You must run these scripts as root. The first script is orainstRoot.sh

[root@172_29_140_62 oraInventory]# ./orainstRoot.sh Changing permissions of /u01/app/oracle/oraInventory to 770. Changing groupname of /u01/app/oracle/oraInventory to oinstall. The execution of the script is complete [root@172_29_140_62 oraInventory]#

The second script is root.sh:

[root@172_29_140_62 db_1]# ./root.sh Running Oracle10 root.sh script... The following environment variables are set as: ORACLE_OWNER= oracle ORACLE_HOME= /u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1 Enter the full pathname of the local bin directory: [/usr/local/bin]: Copying dbhome to /usr/local/bin ... Copying oraenv to /usr/local/bin ... Copying coraenv to /usr/local/bin ... Creating /etc/oratab file... Entries will be added to the /etc/oratab file as needed by Database Configuration Assistant when a database is created Finished running generic part of root.sh script. Now product-specific root actions will be performed. [root@172_29_140_62 db_1]#

That's pretty much it. On the GUI, click next and it will continue until finished.

Configuration of Oracle on RHEL Now, we use the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA), a graphical user interface that interacts with the Oracle Universal Installer, to configure our Oracle software on RHEL 5.

When installing and configuring Oracle, use the documentation that is readily available to you. The release notes for installations on Linux contain the most pertinent information. I strongly recommend that you read. Please also be certain that you satisfy the prerequistes prior to installation, so that you won't run into issues like I did during the install. Don't forget to start up X if you plan on doing an installation and configuration of Oracle anywhere else but the console. Finally, use the tools that are available to you, such as the Oracle Database Creation Assistant and Oracle Enterprise Manager. Even experienced DBAs use OEM because of the options it makes available. You may also want to look into some open source tools (licensed under the GPL), such as the TOra Toolkit for Oracle.

0 comments

E-Mail

Username / Password

Password

By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Privacy